Freight quote follow-up workflow

Direct answer

Treat every sent quote as an open item with an owner and a next date. Record how long the quote is valid, agree simple follow-up rules for each stage, make every chase a message a person reviews and approves, re-quote deliberately when the rate or the shipment details change, pick a reason from a short list when a quote is lost, and hand a won quote to booking with everything it needs. Then report open quotes by age so silence becomes visible.

This page is about what happens after the quote leaves. Collecting supplier costs is covered in freight RFQ management, and the wider customer record sits in CRM implementation for freight forwarders. Pricing itself, including rates and margin, is a commercial decision that belongs to your team and is not part of this workflow.

Record validity on every quote

A freight quote is only good for a limited period, and the period comes from the costs it was built on. If the validity is not written on the quote record, nobody knows whether a follow-up is a friendly nudge or a conversation that now needs a fresh price.

Store the validity date as a field, not as a sentence in an email. Store the version of the quote that the customer actually received, the person who sent it and the date it was sent. Once validity is a field, the system can show which quotes are about to lapse and which have already lapsed, and the difference drives what you do next.

• Validity date or condition, entered when the quote is sent.
• The exact version the customer received, so a later discussion uses the same numbers.
• Assumptions the quote depends on, such as cargo description and the basis used for weight or volume.
• The named owner of the follow-up.

Follow-up rules by stage

Keep the stages few and plain: sent, acknowledged, under discussion, waiting on the customer, won, lost. Each open stage needs an owner and a next follow-up date. The rule is not a target for how often to chase. It is a requirement that no open quote exists without someone and a date attached.

Write the rules as short sentences your team can read without a manual. For example, a quote in the sent stage gets a first check once the customer has had reasonable time to read it, and a quote waiting on the customer gets a date that the owner sets after each conversation. The timings are your decision, since they depend on your lanes and customers. The software's job is to hold the date and surface it.

Chase without spamming

A follow-up that repeats the same question is easy to ignore. Make each contact carry something useful: a reminder of the validity, a clarifying question about the cargo, an offer to adjust the routing, or a note that the situation has changed. Records should show the previous contacts, so whoever writes next can see what was already said.

Drafts can be prepared from the quote record to save typing, but a person reads and approves every message before it goes out. There is no automatic sending in this workflow. That protects against a chase going to the wrong contact, repeating something you have just discussed by phone, or landing after the customer has already told you they are going elsewhere.

It also helps to record who the decision-maker is, separate from who asked for the quote. Chasing an enquiry contact who has no authority is a common reason for stalled quotes.

Re-quote when things change

Rates move, cargo details are corrected, a routing option disappears, or the customer wants a different date. When any of these happens, treat it as a new quote version, not an edit to the old one. The earlier version stays on record, marked as superseded, with the reason for the change.

This matters for two reasons. The customer may refer back to the earlier version, and you need to see exactly what they were told. And when a quote expires without an answer, refreshing it becomes a deliberate action by a person, who checks the underlying costs first, not a silent extension of an old price.

Record lost reasons as a short picklist

When a quote is lost, ask for a reason and store it from a short list rather than free text. A typical list might cover price, transit time, routing, service scope, timing, customer chose another provider, or no response. Add an optional note for the detail. Keep the list short enough that people actually choose from it, and review it now and then so it still matches what customers say.

The reason is often incomplete or polite, since customers do not always say why. That is fine. Recording it consistently still lets you see patterns over time, and recording "no response" honestly is more useful than guessing. The point is a shared record, not a claim about why customers decide.

Hand a won quote to booking

A won quote should move into booking without anyone retyping it. The handoff carries the accepted version, the customer and contacts, the cargo and route details, the assumptions, and any conditions the customer agreed to. Operations should be able to open the booking and see where it came from.

Mark the quote as won only when the customer has confirmed in a way you accept as confirmation, and record who confirmed and how. If details differ between what was quoted and what is booked, the difference should be visible, not buried. This is where the link to shipment exception management begins, because a mismatch at booking is easier to fix than one discovered in transit.

Report open quotes by age

The single most useful view is the list of open quotes sorted by how long they have been waiting, grouped by owner. It shows the quotes with no next date, the ones past validity, and the ones nobody has touched. Sales leads can use it in a weekly review without asking each person for a status.

Keep the report descriptive. It counts and lists what is in each stage. It does not need to predict outcomes, and this page makes no claim about conversion rates you should expect. Your own history, recorded consistently, is the only benchmark that means anything for your business.